Assessment of Aphasia in Iranian Patients Suffering From Frontotemporal Dementia

Objective Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is an uncommon type of dementia. The hallmark feature of FTD is the presentation with aphasia, or behavioral changes which are varies in different subtypes of the disease. We propose a quantitative aphasia test as an additive diagnostic tool for differentiation of FTD subtypes. Method: The study was performed on 20 patients, who were referred to dementia clinic (58 to 78 years old, mean 63, SD 0.8 old) which contained 13 male and 7 female. Based on clinical evaluations, patients were diagnosed as three variants of FTD: behavioral FTD (6 patients), semantic dementia (3 patients) and Non-fluent aphasia (12 patients). The P-WAB-17 test was performed on the patients to assign a diagnostic scale of aphasia, based on the total score of the test (AQ)8 for each variants of FTD. And also sub scores are reported for each components of the test separately. Results: Results of analysis demonstrate that non-fluent patients has deficit in just verbal fluency and the other domains are intact. Conclusion: Based on results, it seems that P-WAB-1 test is a good candidate for assessing of aphasia in patients who suffer from progressive non-fluent aphasia. We referred these patients to speech therapist for rehabilitation.